JNS.org – The government of Syrian President Bashir Assad launched a chemical attack on Saturday on the rebel-held town of Douma, Syria — killing at least 42 people and injuring some 500 more. Once again, our computer screens were replete with helpless children, some lifeless and limp, some foaming at the mouth and flinching, some with oxygen masks strapped across their tiny faces.

This attack was the final blow for the last remaining rebels in this Damascus suburb.

Donald Trump, apparently moved by the images, promised: “We cannot allow atrocities like that. Cannot allow it. If it’s Russia. If it’s Syria. If it’s Iran. If it’s all of them together, we’ll figure it out and we’ll know the answer quite soon.” He warned: “Nothing’s off the table.”

This came within a week of President Trump’s pronouncement that “we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”

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This brings us to the first lesson: Whether or not America wants to enter into a period of isolationism, when we withdraw from the picture the world becomes an infinitely more dangerous place. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when America retreats, all of the moral cockroaches — like Tehran’s mullahs, Syria’s Assad, Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdoğan — immediately swoop in to fill the void.

Akin to the period between the two world wars, the American people might say they have no appetite for further military engagement, yet there is something in America’s moral fabric that simply cannot allow atrocities like these to go unanswered. As Winston Churchill once said: “America always does the right thing. After it has exhausted all other possibilities.”

Over the last seven years of the protracted Syrian civil war, the country has been on a slow and steady path towards total implosion. Initially, an alphabet soup of terrorist groups have used this empty playing field, including, but not limited to, Jabat Al Nusra, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Ahrar al Sham, the IRGC, the Al Quds Force and Hezbollah — many of them proxies for bigger regional players.

Now the big boys are entering the scene, and Syria promises to be the theater in which America and the West might quite soon form a coalition against the regional forces of oppression and their Russian enablers.

The next lesson, therefore, is: If we do not engage ourselves in smaller wars, America might well find itself dragged into a much larger war.

The second major event was the attack on the T-4 air base early Monday morning. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied their involvement, as is characteristic, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made his red lines very clear.

On February 10, when Israel shot down an Iranian drone launched from the identical Syrian air base and flown over Israeli territory, Netanyahu said: “Our policy is very clear. Israel will defend itself against any attack and any attempt to harm our sovereignty.” He then added that, “Iran seeks to use Syrian territory with the expressed goal of destroying Israel.”

Since the singing of the nuclear-trade deal, Iran has used its vastly enriched coffers to empower, embolden, and enable its terrorist proxies within the widening Shiite crescent — and has used Syria as part of its ever-widening land bridge stretching from Tehran to Beirut.

This has been enabled by Russia military support. Russia under Putin wants to re-emerge as a world power and has just asked Iran permission to use its air bases in Iran as refueling stations. Russia also just vetoed the UN Security Council resolution to investigate the Syrian chemical attack in Douma.

Which brings us to the final lesson of these recent Syrian events: In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, famously wrote a book titled, The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he argued that with the end of the Cold War, we were passing through a period of post-war history, and that we had reached the height of the ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the apex and final form of government.

Democracy might be the best form of government devised, but Russia, though the use of its proxies, has shown that it might want to regress to a period of Cold War alliances. And unfortunately, because sometimes the only way to eradicate pure evil — such as was on display this weekend in Douma — is through the use of military force, we are quite far from a post-war epoch.

Sarah N. Stern is founder and president of EMET, an unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-American think tank and policy shop in Washington, DC.

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